Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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One of the most amusing contributions to the early modern debate on the origins of language came from Francis Mercury van Helmont. Like many others, he insisted that Noah spoke Hebrew, but his way of defending and explication that was uniquely his own. In his 1667 Very Short delination of…
You wouldn’t know as you slogged through his impenetrable prose, but Husserl’s turn to phenomenology was, Jonathan Ree argues, a “belated return to plain healthy common sense” ( I See A Voice , 343). All knowledge comes initially through the senses, the scholastics had said, and early modern philosophers had…
Last week at Slate , Mike Pesca assured us that, Montgomery Burns notwithstanding, steeplers aren’t necessarily evil. Steepling is what you do when you form a tent with your fingers. Touching fingers in succession while steepling is optional. Pesca cites the Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allan…
Historically, “aesthetics” has had an accidental relationship to art. Aesthetics, from aesthesis , referred to perception through senses. In this sense, an “aesthetic” theory of art is a theory with a particular focus on the sensory experience of art. If we put aside the peculiar theory of the senses embodied…
John is so subtle that we nearly miss it. Jesus says, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:4), implying that at some time he might not be in the world. Then he heals a blind man with clay and tells him to…
Belief in God is natural, argues Justin Barrett in Born Believers . His is not a theological or philosophical argument about natural knowledge, but a conclusion from interviews, surveys, and other psycho-sociological evidence. Which makes atheism rather an anomaly, Barrett things, and a comparatively rare one. After surveying the factors…
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